Discover the Power of Student Data

Most school boards have asked the administration what paths are our seniors pursuing? Wouldn’t it be nice to hand each board member a report documenting how many seniors plan to attend a 4-year college? How many plan to attend a two-year college or vocational school? How many seniors plan to enter the work force either full time or part time immediately? A customized senior exit survey can provide these answers as well how graduates responded to 15-22 customized questions regarding their high school experience and their perception of the education they received.

Were school counselors helpful in the selection of a path to follow after graduation?
Do graduates think they will be able to easily find a job that can support them?
Do students feel rules were enforced consistently and fairly?
Did school provide a safe learning environment?
The responses to these questions and more can be readily available for you to use as you review your strategic plan and school improvement goals.
Getting started has never been easier. You can gather feedback from your entire senior class with an online senior exit survey for $299 per school (regardless of how many seniors you graduate). Enroll by March 31, 2018 for an online survey and receive 7 additional questions FREE. We’ll even throw in an open-ended question or two if you’re interested! Paper surveys are still available for an additional printing fee and the formatting is restricted to the printed survey format.

If your school board appreciates the data and wants to take it to the next level, we also offer graduate follow-up surveys 18 months and 5 years after graduation. Upgrade your program by 07/31/18 and we’ll apply the $299 for the senior exit survey towards the cost of our comprehensive programs.
Act now. Contact the team at LifeTrack Services for an order form and begin enjoying your helpful data with this year’s seniors.

As providers of school survey programs , LifeTrack Services Inc. was recently featured in the November 2017 New York State School Boards Association “On Board” newsletter article entitled ” Surveying HS graduates helps districts improve.”

Click below for full article on how surveys can help improve school districts

Who can determine if a student has been harassed or bullied? Your students! Schools too often must focus on test scores, attendance data and discipline data in an effort to demonstrate adequate yearly progress. Rarely is perception data gathered and used as a tool for school improvement. LifeTrack School snapshot surveys have been administered as low as 4th grade through 11th grade. Perceptions regarding safety, technology and harassment, as well as other areas, can also benefit an overall education. When equipped with feedback from students, administrators can hold staff accountable for change. Education is a continually changing process. Feedback can help our schools act versus reacting. Feedback also gives a school board necessary tools for making decisions in the best interest of their districts. Nothing speaks stronger to a community than feedback from graduates. Student feedback can be the ultimate measure of a school’s success! For further information, please go to www.graduate-surveys.com

Schools struggle to collect necessary data regarding how well their graduates were prepared for “life after high school”. Graduate follow-up surveys can gather feedback from graduates that are college bound, entering the work force, serving our country in the military, or pursuing other paths. More importantly, they collect perception data about their students’ experience. Knowing how graduates feel about their preparation for life after graduation can help schools adapt to better prepare future students.

Too often, a school is evaluated based on how many graduates attend college. Since college is not feasible for all graduates, schools should not be penalized if graduates choose to work or enter the military. If graduates are equipped with strong reading, writing, and math skills, they can enter the work force and fill jobs needed in every community while supporting themselves. This is success by your school!

Regardless of what graduates choose to pursue after high school, they are the best source for identifying areas where your school is excelling, as well as areas that need improvement. A school may have the most qualified teacher available for a subject. However, students/graduates reporting that they were not prepared in that area reveals a focus for improvement. On the other hand, if you have a teacher that can successfully connect with students, their successful teaching style can be adapted to ensure ALL STUDENTS SUCCEED.

Schools that do not follow-up with their graduates, are missing a critical piece of their success. Graduate follow-up is the ultimate measure of your school’s ability to prepare students for their lives after graduation. Most schools spend $50-70,000 to move a student from kindergarten through graduation. Don’t let that investment walk out the door without having the ability to use their experience for school improvement.

LifeTrack Services, Inc. can offer proven programs to gather feedback from students and graduates. Their graduate follow-up approach is unique to all other school survey programs, utilizing every method available to obtain a response and maximize the response rate to your survey including a fully staffed call center, online surveys, QR Codes, email and text. High response rates and meaningful data are the key to your success with school surveys. LifeTrack takes this burden off of school staff members and provides an affordable, secure method to magnifying their graduates success with surveys.

Visit www.graduate-surveys.com or call 1-800-738-6466 for more information.

center, located in Pennsylvania, reached out to LifeTrack Services, Inc. for help with their state follow-up surveys. Previous year surveys, resulting in a 9.8% completion rate, resulted in a penalty issued by the state due to a poor response rate. The search then began for an effective and affordable solution to increasing survey response rates among students.

After employing LifeTracks’ popular survey program, survey response rates went from 9.8% to 56.6%, almost a 47% increase, indicative that LifeTracks’ proven approach to graduate follow-up does yield results. The difference from other standard survey programs is that they use every avenue possible to get a survey response from a student. This would include the largest differential from other standard survey methods, a call center dedicated to contacting each student in multiple attempts using different methods. From texting links to surveys, emails, letters with QR codes that students can scan with their smart phones to access surveys and calling cell and home phone numbers, LifeTrack gets the highest possible survey response rate.

Responses are tallied and presented in easy-to-read, usable pdf files to schools. Uses for this data are endless for school administrators, districts, teachers, PTA leaders and community. If you want feedback from graduates, LifeTrack Services is your one-stop solution!

With more schools reporting an increase in students taking college-level courses and graduating with college credits, are we really preparing them better for college? If more students are participating in Advanced Placement Exams, does that mean we are preparing them better? Who would know better than your graduates?

How many schools successfully follow-up with seniors 6-18 months after graduation? How many schools gather senior exit data as they prepare for graduation? Imagine being able to see the fruits of your hard work in preparing students for success in their chosen career. From their perspective, how well were they prepared and what could have been done better? Without this information, schools may just be missing out on the most valuable tools available in determining their success as an educational institution.

This monumental task just may be too cumbersome to ensure a successful outcome in-house. Sure, there are easy-to-use survey programs available on the internet. However, this is only part of the total equation. What about the time involved in formulating questions, distributing the surveys and keeping up with address changes of graduates? Then, there is the time-consuming task of producing the data in an easy-to-read format. There is also the issue of data integrity and making sure that each student who responds only takes the survey once. After all of this work, how many responses do you really get?

Businesses such as LifeTrack Services, Inc. offer a proven and secure third-party, unbiased approach to collecting and reporting both senior exit data and postgraduate data at 18 months and 5 years. LifeTrack touts their most popular Graduate Survey program which tracks your student from graduation for 5 years using all avenues for a response including traditional mail, follow-up calls, via a fully staffed call center, QR codes, email and text response. This gets your school the best response rate while saving you time and money allowing you to focus on your job and receive this valuable data.

Prices for the LifeTrack Graduate Survey program are an affordable $14.00 per student for this comprehensive service including the compilation reports as well as follow-up contact with the student. Given that schools invest $50-70,000 to educate a student from kindergarten to graduation, spending $13.50 to follow-up on this investment seems to just make good economic sense.

Surveying your students, tabulating and presenting the results can be a time-consuming task. McKinney ISD has found that using LifeTrack Athletic Surveys helps their programs and keeps them moving in the right direction.

“We began using LifeTrack Services this year for an end of season survey for all of our high school sports. After finishing our fall sports this year I would say that we will be using this service for a long time. The feedback we have received from our athletes and parents has been very valuable for us as we evaluate and make decisions on how to improve moving forward. We have used the surveys to evaluate our programs and to have great conversations with our head coaches, helping them and their programs grow in the right direction.”

Students rate Fauquier Public Schools positively in survey

Friday, Aug. 14 | By Fauquier Times Staff

The vast majority – 93 percent – of the Fauquier County Public Schools Class of 2015 say they had a positive learning experience in high school. The 837 seniors who participated in the survey gave generally high marks in all 15 areas that they rated as part of the “Senior Exit Survey,” a LifeTrack Services survey administered annually during the final week of the school year.

Fauquier County’s most recent graduates gave slightly higher marks than the previous year’s graduates in most of the areas surveyed.

As the highest rating in the survey, 98 percent of students agreed their teachers were knowledgeable about the subject taught. Teachers fared well on two other survey questions: 97 percent said teachers generally have high expectations for quality work, and 95 percent of students felt teachers were available for assistance with academic concerns.*

Coming in with the lowest rating was the choice of electives as 84 percent of students felt that their high school offered enough elective classes for them to explore different career opportunities.

Ninety-one percent of students felt that counselors and teachers were helpful in the selection of a plan to follow after graduation. The survey showed that 87 percent of the Class of 2015 planned to attend a two- or four-year college upon graduation, 3 percent were going to vocational/technical school, 12 percent planned to work full-time and 14 percent part-time, 1 percent planned to work in an apprenticeship and 5 percent planned to join the military. (Students could select all answers that applied.)

Eighty-six percent of the Class of 2015 felt that students at their high school were accepting of diverse races, religions, nationalities, lifestyles and abilities, a percentage that has edged upward by 1 percent each year since the question was first added to the survey in 2012.

The survey revealed that the Class of 2015 felt safe in school; 97 percent of the students felt their high school provided a safe learning environment.

The survey also revealed the following:
· 85 percent felt that school rules were enforced consistently and fairly.
· 88 percent of students felt that staff cared about them.
· 91 percent of students felt their high school provided a strong foundation in the use of technology.
· 95 percent of students felt their high school was clean, orderly and well maintained.
· 96 percent of students felt their high school’s facilities (buildings and equipment) were adequate to meet their needs.
The Class of 2015 gave high markings to their educational experience at high school with 41 percent rating it as excellent, 40 percent as good, and 15 percent as average for a 96 percent positive rating.*

* Six survey questions are in a yes/no format, and nine allow students to assign ratings of excellent, good, average, below average, or needs improvement. Ratings of excellent, good or average were considered positive ratings and below average and needs improvement as negative ratings. The accompanying chart includes the percentage total for excellent, positive and average ratings in brackets for questions 8 through 16.

FCPS high school principals, who receive survey results for their specific school, share the information with their faculty and staff and also use the data in preparing their annual school improvement plan.

There is a second component to the LifeTrack survey service, and that is when FCPS graduates are surveyed two years after graduation using what’s called the “Postgraduate Survey.” While the response rate to these surveys does not match that of the Senior Exit Survey, the data provides a glimpse of how well students feel the school division prepared them for the world of work or the challenge of higher education at a point they’re actually experiencing those things.

Hearing from the Class of 2013

Surveyed two years after graduation, the Class of 2013 still held their education in Fauquier County Public Schools in generally high regard. Of the 278 graduates who responded (out of 819 contacted), 83 percent felt FCPS had offered them a quality education.

Although as seniors 99 percent of the class felt their teachers had held high expectations for quality work, two years later 78 percent of the respondents felt that way and 8 percent disagreed (not all respondents answered all questions). Seventy-five percent felt the academic standards at their high school had been high enough, and 13 percent did not.
Two years out of high school, members of the Class of 2013 were asked how well FCPS had prepared them in the core subjects plus technology. Their responses:
· Math – 81 percent positive and 7 percent negative
· English – 85 percent positive and 3 percent negative
· Science – 87 percent positive and 2 percent negative
· History – 83 percent positive and 6 percent negative
· Technology –71 percent positive and 6 percent negative
They were also asked how well their high schools had prepared them for entering the work force and for continuing their education. Sixty-six percent felt they had been well prepared to enter the work force (12 percent said no), and 79 percent felt well prepared to continue their education (7 percent said no).
As far as safety, 88 percent of the Class of 2013 felt their high schools had provided a safe learning environment (97 percent of the class had answered affirmatively as seniors).
Two years removed from FCPS, 84 percent of the Class of 2013 rated their schooling in Fauquier County Public Schools as a positive learning experience.
A third component of the LifeTrack survey service involves surveying FCPS graduates five years after graduation; the FCPS Class of 2011 will be the first class to participate in this “Culminating Survey.”

Are you new to surveying your graduates with LifeTrack Graduate Surveys? If so, you may be reviewing your first set of reports and graphs, providing insight into your students thoughts and allowing you to evaluate your programs and assess your performance as an educational institution. You may even be looking forward to adding more statistical data and tracking trends by surveying this years’ graduates.

Did you know you can survey prior year grads? Look back into the past and evaluate the results of programs you may have added using prior year surveys. We do the work for you using our fully staffed call center that sets LifeTrack apart from all other survey programs. Get the best response rate possible, just as you do with current year surveys, by surveying for prior years and add to your knowledgebase of valuable information about your students. Interested or wish to discuss the possibilities? just call us at LifeTrack at 800-738-6466 or send an email to Larry@LifeTrack-services.com.

Career and Technical Education (CTE) or vocational schools have blossomed since the initial establishment of trade or apprentice schools of the past. In today’s education world, one can attend a CTE School for everything from Automotive Repair and Maintenance to Marine Biology. Many students, after completing their CTE school, then transfer their credits earned to colleges of their choice and continue on with higher education. Still the same questions beckon, which students will thrive in a hands-on environment? Will students graduating from your school end up in the vocation you have trained them for? How many went on to other colleges?

At LifeTrack Services, Inc., an increasing amount of CTE Schools have added Student Exit Surveys, as well as LifeTrack’s full Graduate Survey System, which includes follow-up results and reports on students for up to 5 years. It makes sense that these types of schools would be interested in seeing whether the students they turn out in the real world end up in the vocation that they have trained for, and whether or not they stick with it.

For more information on survey programs for CTE Schools, please visit Graduate-Surveys.com or call LifeTrack Services, Inc. at 800-738-6466.